Glenn Moore is heading to the Edinburgh Fringe next week with a reprise of his 2022 show Will You Still Need Me, Will You Still Feed Me, Glenn I’m Sixty Moore, which received a five-star Chortle review. Here he kicks off this year’s season of Edinburgh Binge, Cringe and Whinge features, sharing what he can’t get enough of at the festival, his most embarrassing story, and what most irritates him about the month. Aside from the cost of accommodation, obviously.

Edinburgh Binge

I set myself a challenge every Fringe that once per festival, I will walk from one end of the Royal Mile to the other BUT the rule is I cannot be offered a single flyer. This isn’t a case of making it through the gauntlet without taking one - no, the challenge is that if anybody even tries to hand me a flyer, then I’ve failed this pointless game. 

I’m not allowed to run, I have to walk at a normal pace, and have no choice but to wear a facial expression so determinedly unapproachable, so unwelcoming, that nobody even considers making eye contact. 

Tried it six times, managed it twice.

Edinburgh Cringe

Before I was ready to do a full-length show, several years ago I was part of a compilation show that I also was not ready to do. I would die cataclysmically hard every night as the other two acts tore the roof off. Real ‘the only sound in the room is my heart thumping so hard it’s audibly cracking my ribs’ sorts of apathetic deaths. 

After a while, I started to find each show grimly entertaining, and would start doing things for my own amusement if not anyone else’s - one of these was that on the final night, at the end of my poorly-received set, I was going to whip off a pair of tearaway trousers as I finished and not make any reference to it, just to make the other two comedians laugh, hopefully. 

Bought the tearaway trousers, didn’t tell the other acts, did my set to complete silence as per, went to enthusiastically rip the clothes off but instead just caused them to enormously rip down one side, and had to slowly pull my trousers down, untangle myself from them, unpeel them from my shoes and leave the stage. It took –  the way I remember it at least – upwards of three-quarters of an hour. It was, of course, met with Remembrance Day levels of quiet.

Edinburgh Whinge

I don’t know if this is specific just to me, but if I could give any advice about how to avoid the worst thing about the Fringe that I have personally experienced, it would be this: if you’re going to lug a heavy PlayStation (size of a large newborn) in an already weighty backpack through a four-hour standing train journey to Edinburgh, then up several flights of stairs to your flat, just make sure - please make sure - said accommodation has a television. 

It was two days before my run started at last year’s Fringe, and it’s one of the most demoralising pre-show moments of my life (and that’s taking into consideration that Mock The Week was cancelled the next day).

• Glenn Moore’s show is  at 6pm from August 2 to 15 only at Pleasance One. He also has a work-in-progress show at Monkey Barrel 4 at 11.20am. Details at glennmoorecomedy.com